Mehlville
High School – Home of the Panthers!
By
Dre Auclair (SLU MAT Class of 2014)
At the start of this semester, I had no idea what my
clinical experience at Mehlville High School was going to be like. Would I be
thrown into the fire and feel dumb not knowing anything? Would a sit around and
watch and tape the occasional ankle and be a water girl for the most part?
Luckily for me neither of those happened. Well maybe the first while blanking
doing an evaluation. This semester was
the best experience that I could have ever asked for. It started off at a great pace with a ton of
practice and lots of learning from my preceptor Casey Zielinski ATC and ended
with Casey essentially empowering me to make decisions in the athletic training
room and seeing what I would and could do.
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| Dre Auclair (SLU MAT Class of 2014) works with a Mehlville student-athlete doing shoulder strengthening exercises. |
My fellow SLU AT student Mary Rhatigan (MAT Class of 2014) and I went from taping ankles, to taping Achilles tendons to
splinting displaced fractures, helping prevent an athlete from going into
shock, helping with rehab protocols, writing soap notes and ultimately creating
my own rehab programs for athletes and enhancing them as the athlete’s
progression advanced. Never in a million years would I have thought that within
a couple months of entering the professional phase of the SLU AT Program, being
an official Athletic Training Student, would I be evaluating an injury and
deciding on the best rehab protocol for that athlete and following them through
return to play and after.
I owe so much gratitude to Casey. I think that she is the
reason that I was able to thrive in the setting, learn so much and have the
ability to set myself apart and design my own programs based on my own
research. Casey challenged me to think outside the box, encouraged me when I
was struggling and praised me when I did something really well. Having had such
an incredible preceptor who I idolize as an athletic training professional, I
fear that I may have blinders on in my future sites with my expectations of all
my preceptors being just like Casey. I know that this is not the case, but
having had such an incredible experience, moving forward will be hard but will
also be a great learning experience.
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| Dre performs an ice slush treatment with one of the student-athletes in the Mehlville AT Room. |
Not only am I grateful for such an incredible preceptor, but
also a fantastic athletic director, coaching staff, and group of athletes.
Gaining the respect of all of these individuals is a lesson I will take with me
through life. Having built great professional relationships with all of them, I
am confident in my future athletic training student endeavors. Being an
athletic training student at Mehlville also allowed me the opportunity to come
in as a guest speaker and teach an athletic training class how to tape ankles,
the ligaments ankle taping supports and work with the students to practice
taping on each other. The athletes at Mehlville, especially, are a great bunch
of students who are tremendously grateful for the work put in to help them get
back on the field or court.
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| SLU AT students Dre Auclair and Mary Rhatigan were profiled in Mehlville's school newspaper. |
At the end of it all, I would have to say that the most
gratifying moment in my clinical experience was with a freshman girls’
basketball player who I took through the evaluation process of a syndesmotic
ankle sprain, designing my own rehab program for her, taking her through the
program and making it tougher as she progressed and getting her back on the
court. During a break in one of her practices following her return to play, she
ran up to me and was very thankful for everything I had helped her with because
she no longer had any pain playing running and felt 100% better. I look forward
to many more experiences like that one.
This is one of a series of posts by the Saint Louis University Athletic Training students featuring their clinical site and their preceptors. The number, quality and diversity of clinical instruction are major assets for the SLU AT Program.
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